Lesson Plans get Hazy; unfortunate motivations

[Chris O’Mara]

I haven’t been in class for too many direct lessons that Mr. DuBe has given the students that follow directly the patterns of this prompt, but I will do my best to think back to a class a week or so ago when Mr. DuBe was teaching students about verbs. Please forgive me for a lack of detail, as it was a while ago at this point and I was unable to take detailed notes as I wasn’t sure at the time exactly what to be observing.

This picture is from a previous week, but much like the work we have been doing with our own lesson plans, Mr. DuBe makes his learning objectives clear to his students at the beginning of the week and writes more detailed versions of the learning objectives on the board each day where students can see them.

Mr. DuBe was teaching a lesson on verbs, and it seems that one of his main goals was to connect verbs to the lessons he had already given on pronouns and nouns. He took care to always label nouns and pronouns even in the sentences where he was focusing on verbs, and consistently reiterated what role nouns and pronouns were playing in the sentences. Another objective was for students to understand what verbs are and how they work in a sentence; that seems pretty self explanatory. Another objective was to have students be able to identify verbs in a sentence (as opposed to nouns, pronouns, and adjectives), which is part of the goal of understanding what verbs are but also was motivated by verb identification being part of the quiz the students were going to have on verbs in a few days.

Mr. DuBe opened by explaining to students that they use verbs all of the time, but they might not be very sure what exactly they are or be able to point to them in a sentence. By helping students to realize right of the bat that they were already familiar with verbs, Mr. DuBe made the topic feel a lot less foreboding because the students had already heard of verbs; they were just going to become more familiar with them. Mr. DuBe tried to get the students to be intrinsically motivated by noting that understanding verbs was key to writing and they would use their writing skills for the rest of their lives, whether for school, work, or personal matters. He also related it to reading, explaining that understanding verbs makes it much easier to understand what is going on in things the students may be reading, helping to open up many more worlds to them via higher level reading materials. Mr. DuBe also incorporated aspects of external motivation, letting students know that they would be quizzed on verbs at the end of the week and that one of the aspects of the quiz would be identifying verbs in a sentence. Because that was the exact activity that Mr. DuBe was going over with them on the whiteboard, it was an effective external motivator that effectively engaged the students.

I am not positive as to the individual components of the lesson, but I mainly recall Mr. DuBe asking students to suggest basic sentences that included a verb, and then Mr. DuBe would write the sentence on the board. As he wrote out the sentence, Mr. DuBe would label different words of the sentence as either nouns, pronouns, adjectives, or verbs, and then he would ask another student to identify what type of verb was included in the sentence. This got multiple students involved with each example, and was mostly effective at engaging a larger portion of the class in the activity. By asking students to write their own examples for themselves, Mr. DuBe made sure that even students who weren’t interested in sharing their sentences still got some practice writing sentences with verbs. The lesson primarily consisted of this activity, and lasted in all about 10 minutes.

Mr. DuBe concluded the lesson by remarking that the students seemed to have a good understanding of what they had gone over, and by letting students know that they were going to keep going over verbs and their uses during the next few days. He reminded students that there would be a quiz on friday and that they should pay attention to what verbs come up in both their reading and their writing, and that they should do great on the quiz.

The majority of Mr. DuBe’s lessons seem to go something like this, as he spends much of his class time doing activities other than giving traditional lessons. He has lots of assigned reading time, or time for students to work on individual activities like their journals or other assignments. While these are certainly still lessons, and I’m sure they are part of his lesson planning, his class does not feel like it is structured in this way, which made reverse engineering his class and answering the questions more challenging.

This week I spent most of my time working with individual students on catching up on their outlines and writing assignments that are due this coming Tuesday. I spent time with one student who had already developed a rather detailed outline for an essay about his pet cat; it seemed that he had completely disregarded or not understood what the essay was supposed to be about and had instead been working on his own project for the past 5 days. I tried to help the student understand that we had to answer one of the prompts that Mr. DuBe had provided, and that we could find a way to incorporate pets and his cat into the essay, but he was having none of it. He also mentioned to me that he “just wanted to get it done as fast as possible because my parents will kill me if I have another late assignment.” I felt really bad for the student, as I can only imagine how hard it is to feel that kind of pressure to complete one’s work and yet feel so lost when facing the actual work. It felt good to help the student, but it was also troubling and difficult.

[Arlo Hettle]

In the English class that I’ve spent some time in this term, I’ve noticed a similar lack of traditional “teaching” and a larger emphasis on work time and activities. I think this is an interesting facet of high school English classes that have, for the most part, moved beyond direct instruction into more discussion and writing time. In some ways, I imagine this would be harder for teachers to manage. In my English class, for example, they spent three class days working on an assignment only for over half the class to not turn it in on time. The teacher was especially frustrated because that was time she could have spent lecturing or doing more traditional teaching. I’m sure striking that balance as a teacher would be hard.

[Izzy Charlton]

I thought your observation about the student writing the essay about the cat was an interesting one. External motivations, such as parent reactions, can be very influential on a student’s work ethic. Unfortunately, in this case, it seems to be causing the student a lot of stress, which I can relate to. However, there doesn’t seem to be very much intrinsic motivation to do well at all. His derailing from the prompt shows a determination for completion rather than writing a successful essay. I have noticed this same theme in a few of my students as well. These kids are facing many external pressures, including parents, potential careers, colleges, etc. that it can be difficult to find any internal motivation. I myself have felt these pressures, so I understand how the student is feeling. I just hope he can find some internal motivation to successfully focus and complete his essay.

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